PAT CAPUTO: Red Wings looking like a fallen champion WITH VIDEO

When you drive on Jefferson Avenue toward Joe Louis Arena, for more than three decades the home of the Detroit Red Wings, to the left is the famous fist.

It is of Louis himself, arguably the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, who was raised in Detroit.

As great as he was, at the end of his career, Louis lost a bout to an up-and-coming heavyweight and future champion, Rocky Marciano.

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The Red Wings might have experienced a parallel moment Tuesday night.

The Red Wings played hard. Many moments they played well. But in the end, they looked like a team whose time has come and now gone during a 3-1 loss to the Nashville Predators.

Down three games to one, the Red Wings will be on the brink of elimination in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs when the series returns to Nashville Friday.

The last time the Red Wings didn't advance past this early stage of the postseason was 2006.

Adding to the end-of-an-era feeling is it might have been the last home game for Nicklas Lidstrom, who ranks with Steve Yzerman and Gordie Howe as the greatest all-time players for one of professional sports' most-storied franchises. Also, he ranks with Bobby Orr as the greatest defenseman ever.

Louis was knocked out by Marciano, 10 years his junior at the 2:36 mark of the eighth round.

The knockout blow for the Red Wings, barring a miracle-on-ice rally in this series (two of the remaining games if it goes the distance are in Nashville), came in the third period of what had been a scoreless tie.

The Red Wings needed to get off to a good start. They had fallen behind in eight of their previous nine games, including the two games they had previously lost in the series.

And they did -- at least as it pertained to puck possession and shots on goal.

As time moved on, the Red Wings' shots on goal total skyrocketed, but it was misleading. Many of the Red Wings shots on Rinne were lobs that would be stopped by a beer leaguer. There was nobody on the road screening them. Most were high from bad angles and presented easy glove saves for the Nashville netminder.

It was odd how the game then unraveled on the Red Wings. Jimmy Howard fell asleep in the net and Nashville scored from nearly behind the net. It was waved off because "the whistle had blown." It was a lucky break for the Red Wings, but they didn't take advantage of it. Gabriel Bourque scored almost immediately for the Preds. After all that, the Red Wings still fell behind 1-0.

The Red Wings, displaying their championship pedigree at least momentarily, tied it 1-1 when Jiri Hudler deflected a shot past Rinne. Ah, then the moment, the one that could down as one of the greatest blunders in Red Wings' playoff history. The 1-on-3. Ouch.

It was hockey's equivalent of a slam dunk for Nashville defenseman Kevin Klein, who has been turned from, well, Kevin Klein into Orr in this series by the Red Wings' surprisingly haphazard defense. He scored into essentially an empty net after getting a pass from Martin Erat.

"We got caught chasing the puck," said Red Wings coach Mike Babcock, who refused to assign blame on the play publicly.

He did praise Rinne.

"There were a whole lot of mistakes on the other side, but you don't even know who made them because the goalie put his pad down," Babcock said.

A bad giveaway late in the game by Danny Cleary handed Nashville its final goal.

It was a game that was anything but typical of the Red Wings the past two decades. They have been a tremendous team pretty much from the moment Lidstrom took the blue line at Joe Louis Arena for the first time in 1991.

If it is his last home game, it will be anything but a fitting conclusion.